


Somewhere Between

by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-03-26
Updated: 2003-03-26
Packaged: 2019-05-15 12:55:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14790914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: She wants to find the words for what she feels, because she knows that Toby already has them, but he won't use them until she does.





	Somewhere Between

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Somewhere Between**

**by:** Ygrawn

**Character(s):** CJ, Toby  
**Pairing(s):** CJ/Toby  
**Rating:** R  
**Summary:** She wants to find the words for what she feels, because she knows that Toby already has them, but he won't use them until she does.  


Somewhere between getting drenched in the rain and kissing the side of Toby’s neck, CJ starts laughing. She laughs internally, gaspingly, and her body shakes and shudders against his. Toby makes a deep noise of pleasure in the back of his throat, which only makes her laugh harder. He's turned on by her laughter, but she's not laughing at anything funny.

She laughs because they’re stupidly fated to do this over and over again, until it loses its meaning, or they lose themselves to it. Every time before the White House – and the two times since – has been marked by a last-time intensity. But in between those times, they both know it will happen again. Some offhand comment delivered in a low voice – some issue they both feel passionate about – a knowing look across the room during a party – will push them together, lead them separately down the same path until they meet at the fork. 

CJ thinks theirs is the road most traveled; they come this far, to the fork, and stop, only to retrace their steps again and again. 

So, in the tightness and deliciousness of between times they wait to meet at the fork, and she - CJ doesn't know about Toby - waits with sickening dread. She wants this, but she knows how it will ache inside when they give in. 

CJ’s not sure what it is this time. She’s not sure what made her finish up at work and drive hurriedly to Toby’s place. The closest park was two blocks away and that’s why she’s wet. This time, she’s not sure what the final impetus was, except that it wasn't anything obvious. If Toby asked her why she came – which he never does, because it’s one of their unwritten rules – she wouldn’t be able to make it clear to him. She can make very little clear to Toby. 

She tells herself it’s enough that she did come. 

It’s always only a matter of time between them, and who is she to fight time? 

Toby would hate both those clichés CJ thinks, as his fingers snag a lock of her half-wet hair. It will be a frizzy mess in the morning, and Toby doesn’t have a hair-dryer. She winces in pain and still laughs at the same time, her mouth now pressed wetly against the underside of his jaw. Toby hates every cliché in a visceral, burning way, like they’re people who have offended or wronged him. 

There’s a faint contempt in Toby for every word he uses. He often quotes Nietzsche, from the _Twilight of the Idols_ : ‘That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts’. He can quote Nietzsche without sounding like an pretentious fool. Toby sometimes believes that words are only a shallow reflection of the idea or feeling, but they are the only mirror he has. And he loves words too; loves their prescience and permanency. When he writes a word, it stays there forever. 

And so he writes on people; on Sam and Josh, and the President and her. 

Somewhere between kissing the underside of his jaw, and now, as his hands slide down her rib cage, she stops laughing and concentrates on this. 

Cerebrally, Toby has no equal. She believes he is the greatest mind of their generation; ashamedly tells him that when she’s had too much to drink and feels dangerous. There is always a bitter-iron taste of danger in her mouth when Toby gets too close. She isn't sure what it means. Or maybe she is. 

He’s not a typical geek like Sam and the President – he knows tangible Things like they do, but doesn’t regard them with the same awe. They marvel at the act of acquiring knowledge; Toby seems to have been born already knowing Things. He doesn’t have Leo’s street smarts, or his sneakiness, or his practical wisdom. And he doesn’t have Josh’s breathtaking brilliance. 

She could quite possibly love Josh; could love his brilliant mind and his impatience and his errant ways. She’s certain she did love him in another life, because even though he doesn’t give her an iron-bitter taste, he shimmers insistently on her peripheral vision. 

She told Toby that once – during the campaign – and he just raised an eyebrow (she uses thousands of words everyday and his eyebrow eclipses them all) and drained his glass of scotch. Then he took her to bed. 

No, Toby’s mind doesn’t shine like Josh’s or the President’s. His mind is like coffee, or dark chocolate, and all the other clichés Toby hates. His mind shines, but it shines like sunlight through dark green water, or moonlight through fog. He is certain of things; certain of the things that come out of his mind. He doesn’t reproduce somebody else’s ideas; he creates his own, pulls them forth and presents them quietly. Then gets frustrated because people can’t understand it the way he does. He owns words, and uses them like he should be the first and only person to invoke them. 

His certainty – and ownership – is mind-blowingly erotic. 

And yet, he doesn’t speak those ideas and words. He gives them to other people, like hot, precious gifts, wrenched out of his soul. They slip through him, but still mark him, so he carries the scars, but not the rewards. 

She thinks they slip through each other, leaving only scars. 

CJ knows it Toby's absolute certainty that brings her back to him. She rolls them so that she is on top, and finds his eyes watching the curve of her elbow. He likes those innocuous parts of the body. 

And strangely, here, in this part of his life, Toby isn’t certain. She couldn’t call him uncertain, but he’s missing something. His lovemaking – and sometimes his fucking – with her, is oddly nervous. Hesitant. His intensity and his consummate skill make up for it, but there is an apprehension in all of his movements. A holding back. He can’t own her, and he doesn’t want to. 

Toby told her once that she is too amazing to be owned. People can’t really own stars – why should they really own a woman like you, he said. 

She didn’t blush, because Claudia Jean doesn’t blush, but her stomach bounced and she led him upstairs, not daring to touch him until her hotel room door had closed behind them, and Josh and Sam's argument died in the hallway. 

But she still can’t pin down his uncertainty in this particular place. It is, like him, slippery. 

Somewhere between knocking on his door, and tumbling into his bed, CJ lost an earring. It’s a small gold hoop, and she feels lopsided without it. 

Tomorrow, she tells herself. She’ll look for it tomorrow. She shifts her weight over him, hands planted on either side of his lower torso, knees and hips and arms knocking together. 

Tomorrow, she’ll look for many things: her earring, a reason for this, a justification, and the smartest, easiest way to get past it. That part is always her job, and Toby will be the one to find the earring. It is her job because she lets it be her job. Toby would be content to let it lie, to get up, shower, have breakfast, go to work, and wait for the next time they feel stupid and dangerous. He doesn’t need a reason for this thing. She does; she needs to peel back the surface and peer beneath it. 

Because even in the middle of this, as their bodies follow a silent - sometimes noisy - rhythm, they both know it is a slip-up. It’s another desperate, hollow occasion to add to the list. Every time they’ve done this – in countless hotel rooms, her car, his bathroom, once in her front hallway because he was in such a hurry, and their respective beds – they’ve known it was a slip-up. 

Maybe, knowing that tomorrow morning will be awkward is the reason for Toby’s hesitancy. 

Maybe he too, is thinking ahead whilst in the middle of this. 

It’s because they’re politicians. You can never just concentrate on today, because tomorrow, something else will blow up, and you need to be ready. Living in the moment is for the ordinary people that Toby sees pictures of and yearns for, without knowing what's so appealing about scuba-diving and working nine to five. 

She and Toby fit together perfectly in all the important, abstract ways, and yet they fall apart in every real, practical way. In her head, she doesn’t picture real things with Toby. No house, no children and a dog, and holidays at the shore. 

She does picture growing old with him, watching his remaining hair go grey, watching his skin dry up and wrinkle, but Toby belongs to her like a limb, so that’s not surprising. She pictures growing old with Sam, and Josh, and Donna, their lives twined together too strongly now to walk away from them and pretend they were just people she worked with once, in the supernova of her life. 

Once, when she was young – Sam, her beautiful, still-young Sam says she still is – CJ imagined all those things: the house, the children, the dog, and the over-priced, crowded holidays at the slowly dying beach. Vividly, and happily she imagined it all, with the kind of stupidity only the young possess. But it never worked out, so she thinks that maybe the freedom of this – the lack of expectation – isn’t such a bad thing. 

But she came here tonight because time seems to be dissolving beneath her. When she looks behind her, the most recent memories are submerged. They’re hidden from her, and she pushes to find them, struggles to control the feeling of helplessness when they come to her hazy and sleepy. The older memories are sharpened and clear, but that makes them feel even further away. 

There’s an urgency that comes at night when she’s lying in bed alone, or at two o’clock in the morning when she’s still working, to pin Toby down now. 

Before, she never thought about time; assumed there would be enough. 

Now, she thinks about it. 

But she resists the pressing desire to pin Toby down because he still wears his wedding ring. It’s cool against her skin – her inner thigh now – cooler than the raindrops that are starting to dry across her body. While the rest of Toby burns, the ring stays permanently cold. 

CJ told herself, when Toby was married, that she didn’t care. Because she didn’t. They weren't ever the white-wedding kind, or even the bizarre beach-wedding kind. When she called him for advice after he was married, or just to talk about life, she didn’t care. He was still Toby. He still kept part of himself for her, kept it separate from his marriage. 

But, when she visited him in New York, she would become self-conscious. Always, it seemed, Andie was watching her, with a look she still can’t find a word for, even now. She would go to touch Toby, or remind him of some long-ago, stumbling-drunk story, and then she'd see the look and stop suddenly, tripping over the words or herself. CJ would get annoyed with herself for feeling guilty about something that didn’t exist. And then more annoyed with herself, because it did exist, but everybody pretended it didn’t. 

So, in truth, she did mind. 

It made Toby unhappy, so she stopped visiting until the very end. Even then, in an apartment filled with half his and Andie’s furniture, she still felt self-conscious. 

Andie is still watching her, with the wedding ring. Still staking a claim on Toby CJ has never managed to make. Just as Toby doesn’t want to own CJ, she doesn’t want to own him. She can’t own his depth and knows that was Andie's mistake. 

But the ring still chews at her; makes her self-conscious. 

Somewhere between bumping her elbow on Toby’s bedroom door in haste, and now in greater haste, as he moves inside her, CJ begins to cry. 

Tears leak out of her, as silently as her laughter did. She can’t understand, can’t control it, and can’t make herself want to control it. Part of her is always crying about the two of them. Crying because they’re stupidly fated to do this, and their certainty about everything else is so fucking useless. 

What else - Josh once said as they sat in a McDonald's at three in the morning, cold and shitty - what else is there but love? She laughed, surprised that he could be so openly philosophical. He often seems to wear his cynicism with pride. He made a hurt face when she laughed, and she fell a little bit more in love with him, and called him “mi amor” for the first time. 

She also secretly agreed with him. 

Toby’s thumb brushes her cheek - tenderly - and follows the lines of her tears. It is that which brings CJ to orgasm. The feeling leaks through her like the laughter and the tears. 

Somewhere between the first time and now, Toby has grown softer. He carries weight that he didn’t use to; he has lost hair that she can’t remember him ever having. She too bears the years, but Toby said once, when he was drunk – she stops to wonder why, in many of her stories, somebody is always drunk – but Toby said that her wrinkles are on the inside. 

It must be those wrinkles that make her so tired of this. 

She wants to find the words for what she feels, because she knows that Toby already has them, but he won't use them until she does. 

Somewhere between falling in her pool and here, in the faintly-satisfied, mostly pyrrhic aftermath of what cannot possibly be the last time, CJ has fallen in love with him. 

Somewhere between the two of them are the seconds of happiness, completeness, stupidity, Fate, awkwardness, miscommunication, hotel rooms, hesitation, anger, hurt, campaign busses, and victory that they have experienced. 

When added together, in her head, it is enough to make CJ think there’s time yet. 


End file.
